Well, I suppose I forgot to mention Drive 3 (backup stuff):
MBR: Legacy Grub
P1 - Ext2 (GParted)
P2 - NTFS (backup for Windows)
P3 - Ext4 ("Recovery Linux" of my own design)
P4 - Swap
I've tried to put in on a FAT32 once. It gives you an error much earlier on...
Window 7 Ultimate, 64 bit. Windows 7 on boot HD. (C:) alone. (Except the 100Meg "System Reserved, Healthy partition" Disk Management reports seeing ahead of it on that physical drive.)
Virgin Windows 7 state, so I was going to create a system image to an empty external USB 1TB NTFS HD before starting to muck with Windows. I got the same error as the others, VSS and SPP are floored. Starting them manually under Services did not solve the issue.
I have a secondary internal HD with an EFI and a MacOS partition as a boot OS alternative. Although Disk Management reports those two partitions being healthy, they have no drive letters in Disk Management, and Computer doesn't show their OSX format HD as MacDrive is not installed on this box - yet. (Yes, OSX boots/works fine from them, otherwise.)
Hello mrdelurk, welcome to Seven Forums!
Why don't you one of the free 3rd party programs to do the backup/image, you'll have a lot less issues in the long-run, have a look at this tutorial at the link below and be sure to post back with any further questions you may have and to keep us informed.
Just be sure if the new Windows 7 "System Reserved" partition is present that it be included in all images you create as it is needed because it contains the Windows 7 "System" boot files.
Imaging with free Macrium
Thank you for the Macrium tip, the app worked great, indeed.
Funny how the two Windows 7 additions that seem the most essential to me (Macrium and VMWare) rely both on Linux at the core. (So does Acronis.)
Are we moving towards a Linux-based Windows?
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